Pony in Here Somewhere

Old Ronnie Reagan used to tell the story of the optimistic child who on Christmas morning finds a pile of manure in his room and excitedly cries, “There’s a pony in here somewhere!”

He was an optimist himself, old President Pompadour and I’m one too. An optimist and a romantic. Wasn't it my notion that our seven-month-pregnant girl would just LOVE a 1500-mile trip by train to Florida which turned out to nearly put her in the hospital? “The sun is coming out, I can tell!” I’m always chirping in the midst of hellish downpours. Or, “Look at that lovely lone hawk tending its young!”- and it turns out to be a vulture eviscerating a bunny.

Yesterday on the highway I spotted two horse trailers up ahead and entered a whole waking dream in which I saw again my horse-riding days at Camp Fernwood: pictured the warm flanks of the beasts as we rested out little knees against them; the feel of leather and horseflesh; the exalted pride I felt when I learned to sit a canter and leave no daylight at all between bottom and saddle.

I kept almost catching up to these two trailers, though they rode on well ahead of me, disappearing always over the edge of that next hill. Lovely roans and palominos, I pictured. Nickering and swaying I all but heard and all but saw, and imagined those muscular haunches.

I got to where I thought I could smell them even. Thought I could just glimpse their manes flowing out in the breeze; their wonderful fly-flicking tails - until after about an hour when I caught up with them both and they weren’t horse trailers at all. They were two flatbed trucks carrying eight Porta-Potties.

Porta-Potties!  just like the one that naughty kids pushed onto my car the winter before last on New Year’s Eve! Porta-Potties, dang it all!

And then, double-dang, if it didn't start pouring out, and all I could think of was me at 59 years of age, old TT, and one saucy song from camp days too: "And there was Grandma (ba da da DUM) Swingin' on the Outhouse door!"